With increased numbers of data sources on the Internet, networks, Web sites, and/or other resources, search engines and other functionality for searching resources have become an important tool for locating information. Searchers may submit queries to a search engine to identify documents that match particular search strings. To respond to these queries, search engines or other search applications often maintain search indexes against which queries can be run.
Because the search indexes may correspond to extensive numbers of documents associated with the resources, the search index files can consume a large amount of data. In the case of a Web search engine, for example, a search index file may consume hundreds of Gigabytes or even terabytes of data. On top of the large size of the search index files, search engines also may be configured to maintain multiple copies of the search index files. For example, multiple copies of the search index may be maintained to accommodate simultaneous queries, to provide redundancy of the search index, to distribute copies of the search index geographically, and/or for other purposes.
Because the search index files can be large, maintaining multiple copies of the search index can be expensive in terms of time, computing, and/or network resources. In particular, if a copy of the search index is corrupted or lost, restoring that copy can require transfer of the search index file between multiple devices to replace the corrupted or lost file. This can impact performance of the search engine by inhibiting access to the search index files and consuming computing and network resources among the devices hosting the search index.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.